Tweetbot Brings Tons of New Features to the iPhone

If you've been settling for the official Twitter client for iPhone, you might want to take a look at Tweetbot. The app just arrived on the scene this week, and it's already giving the official client a run for its money.

If you've been settling for the official Twitter client for iPhone, you might want to take a look at Tweetbot. The app just arrived on the scene this week, and it's already giving the official client a run for its money feature-wise, and it's giving other more robust Twitter apps some ideas for future improvement. For example, Tweetbot gives you a single-swipe method to view conversations, the ability to view your Twitter lists as your main stream, customizable tabs and views, and push notifications.

The app is currently available in the iTunes App Store for an introductory price of $1.99. For that price you get all of these features as well as the ability to save drafts, add locations to your tweets, and support for services like Instapaper and Read It Later. Tweetbot requires iOS 4.1 or later to run.

Among the biggest features in Tweetbot are the ability to tap a tweet to have a bar appear below it that gives you buttons to respond, retweet, and favorite it. Daring Fireball explains this is a big deal since most Twitter clients instead bring up the tweet in its own window when you want access to those functions, and Tweetbot's approach makes responding to or interacting with a person's tweets more efficient.

There's also the ability to swipe a tweet left-to-right to bring up that tweet and any replies to it and any predecessors it may be a reply to. This means you can quickly catch up on conversations that your Twitter friends are having with one another without having to dig back through replies first.

In addition to those features, the app also supports multiple timelines and multiple accounts, and gives you the ability to turn twitter lists into timelines you can read like any other. You also have the ability to configure the last two tabs in the interface to be whatever you want them to be: whether they're vanity searches, commonly used hashtags, or another account's timeline, you can set them up however you choose.

Tweetbot also has full support for Instapaper and Read It Later so you don't have to remember to scroll back through a ton of tweets to find a link you wanted to visit, and has Cloudapp URL shortening built-in. There are even push notifications designed by the makers of the app. Tweetbot's features are unique now, but expect to see them included in other Twitter clients soon - especially the official one - if the furor over it continues.